A Northwest Side couple who kept six of their seven children in a cold basement and hit them with a wooden paddle to keep them quiet have been arrested and charged after a tip to an abuse hot line, police said Saturday.
Robert Hernandez, 55, and Annette Hernandez, 46, of the 5000 block of North Mobile Avenue were each charged overnight Friday with six counts of endangering the life of a child and six counts of domestic battery, all misdemeanors, officials said.
The six children were “confined in the basement with no food, no bed and no toilet and minimal heat, and no chance to escape in the event of an emergency,” said Sgt. Robert Cargie, a police spokesman.
Five of the children had been adopted, and the sixth was in a subsidized guardianship similar to adoption, according to the Department of Children and Family Services.
The couple’s biological child, a toddler, did not appear to have been abused, said police spokesman Carlos Herrera. All seven children, including four boys and two girls between the ages of 6 and 10, were taken to an emergency shelter.
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Police said they began investigating after getting a hot-line tip from a Chicago Public Schools counselor.
Martha Allen, chief of staff for DCFS, said she could not talk about the circumstances leading to the charges, but said children “don’t become wards unless they are abused or neglected generally.”
Children and family services workers planned to have doctors check out the children, she said. But she noted that the kids weren’t taken directly to the hospital, so workers must have thought it was not an emergency.
The agency likely will seek custody of all seven children in court Monday, Allen said, although she said she would have a better idea Sunday whether the biological child would be included.
This was the first hot-line complaint against the couple, who were licensed through the agency, Allen said. Because the couple had adopted the children, no caseworkers were checking up on them.
“Once the kids are placed in an adoptive or guardianship home, those kids are there,” she said. “There’s no visits from any caseworker.”
The adoption would have been authorized by the courts, DCFS and the public guardian.
Before a couple can adopt, Allen said, they are checked out.
“There’s a home study done to determine if the home is safe. … But nobody can tell if someone is going to put kids in a basement.”
News of the arrests shocked the couple’s neighbors in Jefferson Park.
Several people said they saw few if any troubling signs from the Hernandez home.
But one neighbor, who asked that his name not be used, saw small indications that all was not well.
“I felt sorry for the kids,” he said. “They’ve been kept downstairs for a long, long time.”
Annette Hernandez told him she had remodeled the basement to include bedrooms, he said. But it seemed the children did not get outside to play much.
Neighbor Katy O’Mahony said the children seemed well-dressed, well-fed and polite.
But O’Mahony said she has seen less of the family since the weather grew cold.
“This is a big surprise to us,” Katy O’Mahony said. “They seemed like very good parents to us.”